Orlando Figes was and is a villain in the International Marxist Tendency. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal, he was rubbished as a loathsome bourgeois historian whose sole duty is to besmirch the spotless banner of Bolshevism and the glorious legacy left behind by Lenin and Trotsky. Back in 2013, for some reason, Figes agreed to do a debate with Alan Woods, head of the IMT, about the Russian Revolution. It is available on YouTube. Was Figes wise to give publicity to such a loathsome sect by gracing it with his time and energy? Probably not. As it happens, the whole thing was just a propaganda stunt, hosted by the organisation’s Marxist Society at Queen Mary’s University, with the aim being, not to clarify the truth about the October insurrection, but to repeat the organisation’s nauseating propaganda to an impressionable audience, no doubt packed with ‘comrades’ and sympathisers of the sect, where they would see a ‘bourgeois academic’ be taken down by the forceful rhetoric of the mighty Alan Woods.
In the video (which was entirely filmed by the organisation, and no doubt subject to manipulative editing), one can find footage at the end of an exasperated Figes responding intemperately to some of the ‘interventions’ that were coming from the floor. The first time I watched the debate, shortly after I had joined the organisation, I found Woods more convincing, especially due to Figes losing his temper towards the end. It is a shame he could not have conducted himself more soberly, thereby playing into the cult’s hands. Woods, for his part, just uncritically repeats the Trotskyist narrative, with the same rhetorical style he uses for all his ‘lead-offs’, including the bizarre rhetorical question, ‘If the October revolution was just a coup by a handful of conspirators, tell me the secret, and I will take power in London tomorrow at nine o’clock!’ This is his riposte to the allegation that the Bolshevik coup was not a genuine popular revolution, but a seizure of power by a minority. This is of course an exercise in missing the point. The Bolsheviks certainly had a degree of popular support, but it was not even close to a majority of the country. Insofar as they had the majority of the workers on their side, it was because they were seen as the party of Soviet power. Most workers wanted a Soviet coalition, not the Bolshevik one-party state they got. As Trotsky himself conceded in his account of the events, only a small number of people were needed to carry out the insurrection. Had their real aims been public knowledge, only a handful of the people that took part in the coup would have offered their services for this filthy endeavour. Woods’ idiotic strawman would have us believe that all those who accuse Lenin and Trotsky of conspiratorial methods think that they took power with their bare hands, without needing accomplices. Yet this is precisely what every violent seizure of power needs, popular support or not. Even the coups that take place in West African banana republics have significant numbers of ordinary troops taking part. There may even be shouts of acclamation from members of the public for their new overlords, but this is not proof of majority support, but at best, of popular indifference, which was certainly the case in 1917.
Why did the organisation pick Figes in particular to debate? Wasn’t Robert Service available? Or Christopher Read? Maybe Figes, being the most high-profile of the three, was the best bet propaganda-wise. I would be curious to know about the process by which the organisation got into contact with Figes to arrange this ‘debate’.
I recall Woods alluding to Figes and this debate more than once during my time in the organisation. In one lead-off, he pretended to be confused as to how to pronounce his name, before giving up in exasperation – ‘I don’t care what his mother calls him, he’s an idiot anyway.’, to laughs from the conformist audience, myself included. Thus speaks the septuagenarian cult leader of a minuscule and politically irrelevant Marxist sect, who has spent his decades on this earth peddling falsehoods and corrupting vulnerable youths with his stupidity, of the Professor of Modern History at Birkbeck University, author of numerous award-winning books, the fruit of decades of careful and considered research. One has chosen to waste his life on obscurantist propaganda, whilst the other has dedicated his life to pursuing truth. I know which one of those I respect more, and which one is more deserving of the label ‘idiot’.
I purchased Figes’ book just a month or so before leaving the sect, but never got round to reading it until now. It had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched. As my doubts about the organisation’s narrative around October developed, I was keen to get my hands on alternative information. I committed the heretical act of purchasing Figes’ book, knowing that Figes was a bogeyman in the organisation. However, that made the prospect of reading him even more exciting. Moreover, I was confident that reading him would only strengthen my faith. I had read Isaac Deutscher’s famous biography of Trotsky just months into my membership of the organisation, and it failed to make a dent in my faith, despite his criticisms of Trotsky, which I did not fully internalise at the time. I only found out later that Deutscher was also a bogeyman in our sect, that Woods despised him, and that in reading his magisterial work on Trotsky (still, decades later, the most comprehensive biography on him) I had broken an unspoken rule against reading ‘renegades’. Deutscher was himself an ex-Trotskyist who broke with the Trotskyist movement, whilst continuing to admire Trotsky.
Having finally read all 800+ pages of Figes’ work, I can say that it is a masterpiece, and that I don’t know why Woods and co were so vexed about Figes as if he was the worst anti-communist among ‘bourgeois’ historians. Whilst no fan of communism, and whilst harshly critical of the Bolsheviks, he also presents a nuanced analysis that rejects the extreme positions of right-wing historians like Richard Pipes on the one hand, and left-leaning revisionists on the other. But this isn’t good enough for people like Alan Woods and Ted Grant. Any historian who shows anything less than uncritical support for everything Lenin and Trotsky did and said is a scoundrel to them. Even the mildest of criticisms from people like Paul Mason and Isaac Deutscher is beyond the pale, and incontrovertible proof that you are a disgusting renegade deserving only of slander and derision. This is the closed mindset of these anti-intellectual buffoons, who think that the unthinking repetition of slogans, cliches and quotes from Lenin and Trotsky like magical incantations is enough to dispose of any argument or criticism of their demented ideology. As Paul Levi put it in 1924:
But this recognition of Lenin’s stature, in itself no bad thing and shared by many, leads on to two phenomena whose dangers can be seen in the work of Trotsky. One is the emergence of a Lenin philology, similar to the Goethe philology in Germany or the Pandects literature[6] of the Middles Ages. So in every single situation, volume, chapter, paragraph and clause of a sentence by Lenin will be quoted which will either fit the given situation or not as the case may be. In place of living criticism comes the conception, autos epha, the master has spoken. Not only does Trotsky quote Lenin’s words in this way, he does it with a certain roguish justification, because he contrasts Lenin’s words with the present fleshly leaseholders of Lenin’s soul. His adversaries are not idle, for Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin hold up all the works, words and hints of Lenin to refute Trotsky. Commentaries and treatises are delivered and put forth. The Tausves Jontof[7] has yet to be written, but we are sure that it will be.
But let us move on to the main topic of this blog post, Figes’ book. As I said before, it is a magisterial work. Figes has that rare talent of an academic – bringing his research to life through vivid writing. It is lofty and high-brow but never too abstract, and it is entertaining without being gimmicky or condescending. He enlivens the narrative by giving us mini-biographies of individuals within Russian society at this turbulent time – the ambitious moderniser, Sergei Semenov, who sought to transform his village in the teeth of reactionary opposition, the zealous Bolshevik convert and peasant soldier, Dmitri Oskin, the writer Maxim Gorky, frenemy of Lenin who was repulsed by the Bolshevik revolution, and so many more. All of them reacted to the revolution in different ways. Everyone, from the highest to the lowest in society, had their lives turned upside down. Some thrived in the new order. Most either perished, or eked out a miserable existence sheltering from marauding armies, engaging in illegal trade and, in the case of the peasantry, hiding what little grain they had from thieving Bolshevik requisitioning squads.
It would be impossible for me to do justice to this massive book. Other, far better reviews are out there. I will simply post some highlights of what I got out of it. Can you believe that, despite all the propaganda I was fed in the IMT about how oppressive and cruel the Tsarist regime was, the truth is that the Tsarist administration was in fact a paper tiger, barely capable of maintaining its authority in the provinces? Figes dedicates many pages to explaining how the provincial bureaucracy was utterly ineffective in dealing with crime or collecting taxes. (Pp.45-46 and p.102 provide some particularly juicy insights.) The peasants even had a trick whereby they would elect the village idiot as their elder, or elect otherwise unsuitable individuals to local administration, frustrating the state’s attempts at controlling the countryside. As Figes explains, ‘The power of the tsarist state never really penetrated the village, and this remained its fundamental weakness until 1917, when the power of the state was removed altogether and the village gained its volia.’ The peasants had their own customs and traditions for dealing with disputes, and this served to supplant the official laws of the land. The endemic weakness of the state in the countryside, and the failure to integrate the peasantry with the civilised, law-governed society existing in the cities, allowed for the explosion of 1917, in which the peasantry, in a moment of historic weakness for the Tsarist regime, took the opportunity they had long awaited and threw off the chains of oppression.
Figes is very sympathetic to the plight of the peasantry, even as he does not shy away from depicting their darker sides. This is a wonderful counterweight to the standard account from both Marxist and right-wing historians that disparages the peasantry as having next to no agency of their own. Yet, as Figes shows in his research, the peasantry had their own sense of identity and their own ideas about how society should be governed. The dream of the peasant was to be free of the grip of the state and urban society, and for the peasants to govern themselves. They may not have had the education to articulate it in a sophisticated manner, but what they wanted was closer to some sort of anarchism than Marxism. Stolypin’s attempt to destroy the villages in favour of peasant capitalism was doomed to failure, and in the end, even the Bolsheviks had to bow down before peasant interests to maintain their rule.
Figes is first and foremost a social historian, and provides a wealth of statistical and geographical detail about the shifts taking place in Russian society during this time. I can’t go into it all in this review, but anyone who reads it will find it fascinating. He does it with verve and in a way that isn’t at all dry. He also manages to get the balance pretty much perfect when it comes to discussing the social and political aspects of the conflict. Had the book been any shorter, he might not have managed it.
Figes is masterful when describing the seismic events of 1917. The tragicomedy of the Tsarist government, hopeless in the face of this unprecedented challenge, is discussed in all of its horrifying detail. In the end, its collapse is an anticlimactic moment, occurring not because of a workers’ revolution, but an army mutiny, spearheaded not just by the peasant soldiers, but by resentful modernisers within the officer corps like Brusilov, who are sick to death of the Tsarist regime and are no longer prepared to risk their necks for it. Lenin’s return in April 1917 is a turning point, in which the Bolshevik Party is pushed, slowly but surely, from the position of accommodation with the new Provisional Government to a position of agitating for its overthrow. It is clear that Lenin had always aimed, from the very beginning, for the rule of a one-party state, and that he had always sought civil war to polarise the country and force the masses behind his rule. (pp.615-616)
Figes describes the carnage and social destruction that resulted from this horrific conflict, in which he estimates that ten million people lost their lives. (I have seen estimates as high as twelve million.) This is a country that was so ruined by revolutionary turmoil that the countryside literally reverted to a medieval economy. (pp.607-609). Workers deserted the cities to seek food in the countryside. Figes’ research shows that, despite Bolshevik propaganda, the workers who were left in the cities were the very same who had brought them to power, and the very workers who turned against them and launched strikes and protests against the regime from the spring of 1918 onwards. (p.610)
Figes’ discussion of the ‘bagmen’ phenomenon, in which workers left the cities to buy food from the countryside, then returned with bags of food from the black market, is particularly informative. At one point, an informal network of co-operatives developed between town and village, which I thought was an interesting example of the masses showing initiative that the Bolsheviks tried to suppress with their bureaucratic measures. (pp.611-612). The Bolsheviks tried in vain to crush the bagmen, and, as Figes’ explains, this ideological hostility to the market led directly to War Communism., and the organised theft of grain from the peasantry (pp.613-615). Figes does not accept that War Communism was entirely a response to circumstances, or purely a response to ideology, but an ad hoc response to the urban crisis that emerged in 1918, with a strong underpinning of ideology. Thus began the disastrous experiment called ‘War Communism’, designed to feed the cities (pp.618-622). The Committees of the Rural Poor that were set up to assist with this mad scheme were filled with people who weren’t even peasants, or seriously connected to village life. Grain was seized, women were raped and the peasants revolted. All this proved the falsity of the Bolshevik claim that the peasantry were divided into ‘poor peasants’, who were natural allies, and ‘kulaks’, peasant exploiters. Finally, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to abolish the committees by the end of 1918, as Lenin himself had come to admit its futility. The first disastrous grain requisitioning scheme of 1918 saw only a fifth of the levy collected by the end of the year. This was partly due to bureaucratic incompetence, with the local committees often keeping the grain for themselves. The collection depots could not send all the grain they had collected due to fuel shortages. In January 1919, a reform was introduced that made the requisitioning campaign even more stringent, including a wider range of foodstuffs, and fixing the levy in line with what the state believed it needed, rather than the actual harvest surplus. The exploitation of the peasantry accelerated to new heights. Despite attempts to crush the ‘bagmen’ and crack down on illegal markets, illegal trade flourished. (pp.622-623). As Figes himself explains, ‘The Cheka would occasionally carry out a raid, seizing goods and arresting vendors, after which business would slow down for a few days, but then the markets would return to normal.’
It is clear from reading Figes’ account that the bureaucratic degeneration of the party-state began under Lenin. Elections were rigged, strikes brutally suppressed, innocents killed by the Cheka, often for personal disputes that led to them being denounced to the authorities as counter-revolutionaries. Local Cheka agents behaved more like a mafia than revolutionaries. As Figes explains:
All Communist electoral tactics employed in this century to subvert democratic bodies were first developed in the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks engaged in widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation of the opposition. Voting at Soviet and trade union congresses was nearly always done by an open show of hands so that to vote against the Bolsheviks was to invite harassment from the Cheka, whose presence was always strongly felt at election meetings. With a secret ballot the Bolsheviks would not have won very many elections. ‘Soviets without the Communists!’ was increasingly the slogan of the workers and the peasants. But the Bolsheviks did away with this ‘convention of bourgeois democracy’ on the grounds that a secret ballot was no longer needed in the ‘higher form of freedom’ apparently enjoyed by the Soviet people. And with the system of open voting – which was the tradition of the Russian village commune – there were very few elections they could lose. Even the artists of the Marinsky Opera, hardly a bastion of Communism, voted unanimously for the Bolsheviks in the Soviet elections of 1919.-pp.685-686
The bureaucrats were given privileges, with Lenin’s approval, that placed them above the working-class. So much for state officials earning no more than an average worker, as Lenin had argued in State and Revolution:
In 1918 Lenin himself had backed a plan to organize a special closed restaurant for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd on the grounds that they could not be expected to lead a revolution on an empty stomach. ‘The workers will understand the necessity of it.’ Since then the principle had been gradually extended so that, by the end of the civil war, it was also deemed that party members needed higher salaries and special rations, subsidized housing in apartments and hotels, access to exclusive shops and hospitals, private dachas, chauffeured cars, first-class railway travel and holidays abroad, not to mention countless other privileges once reserved for the tsarist elite.
Five thousand Bolsheviks and their families lived in the Kremlin and the special party hotels, such as the National and the Metropole, in the centre of Moscow. The Kremlin’s domestic quarters had over 2,000 service staff and its own complex of shops, including a hairdresser and a sauna, a hospital and a nursery, and three vast restaurants with cooks trained in France. Its domestic budget in 1920, when all these services were declared free, was higher than that spent on social welfare for the whole of Moscow. In Petrograd the top party bosses lived in the Astoria Hotel, recently restored to its former splendour after the devastations of the revolution as the First House of the Soviets. From their suites, the could call for room service from the ‘comrade waiters’, who were taught to click their heels and call them ‘comrade master’. Long-forgotten luxuries, such as champagne and caviar, perfume and toothbrushes, were supplied in abundance. The hotel was sealed to the public by a gang of burly guards in black leather jackets. In the evening government cars were lined up by the entrance waiting to take the elite residents off to the opera or to the Smolny for a banquet. ‘Grishka’ Zinoviev, the ‘Boss of Petrograd’, often came and went with his Chekist bodyguards and a string of assorted prostitutes.
The top party leaders had their own landed estates requisitioned from the tsarist elite. Lenin occupied the estate of General Morozov, at Gorki, just outside Moscow. Trotsky had one of the most resplendent estates in the country: it had once belonged to the Yusupovs. As for Stalin, he settled into the country mansion of a former oil magnate. There were dozens of estates dotted around the capital which the Soviet Executive turned over to the party leaders for their private use. Each had its own vast retinute of servants, as in the old days.’-pp.683-684
How convenient that Trotsky did not identify any bureaucratic degeneration until after Lenin was dead. Figes discusses how the Bolsheviks sought short-cuts to communism, with Trotsky advocating the building of socialism through forced labour. Around this time, the Bolsheviks began to speak disparagingly of the workers, who now rejected Bolshevism and looked upon it with hated. They referred to them as the ‘workforce’ rather than the ‘working class’ (pp.722-723). Trotskyists will argue that this was ‘objectively necessary’ due to Russian backwardness, but, as Figes explains:
‘The peasant labour teams, like the labour armies, proved fantastically inefficient. It took fifty conscripts one whole day, on average, to cut down and chop up a single tree.
…Equally ineffective were the subbotniki, Saturday labour campaigns, when workers and students were dragooned as ‘volunteers’ into such noble socialist duties as clearing rubbish from the streets and squares.’-p.725
So not only was it totalitarian, it didn’t even achieve its aims. So much for the superiority of socialist forced labour over capitalist hired labour that Trotsky had asserted in his ridiculous book, Terrorism and Communism. As if this wasn’t enough, the Bolsheviks deliberately sabotaged the money economy in their bid to destroy capitalism, deliberately printing money to exacerbate inflation, so that people would stop using money and it could be replaced with a state-sponsored coupon system as a means of distributing and exchanging goods (p.726). This hare-brained scheme also failed.
When Figes recounts the senseless violence that dominated life during this brutal period in Russian history, my mind goes back to the decades’-old debate that the Bolsheviks had with themselves and with their opponents – what is the relationship between means and ends in building socialism? When Figes talks about the senseless violence and brutality practiced by the Cheka on their enemies, the generation of children that grew up orphans and even took to petty crime, or, still worse, fought in the war, the children who grew up smaller and weaker than the preceding generation due to the lack of nutrition, one is forced to ask – how was any of this worth it, and how could the Bolsheviks believe that all this carnage was would lead to a better society? Victor Serge and others had the courage to ask these difficult questions, and even to put forward the idea that certain methods should be rejected by revolutionaries as incompatible with creating a more just society. Trotsky would not hear of such ‘bourgeois’ moralising. If only he had heeded the wise words of Serge:
We won’t take up here the vain discussion of whether the ends justify the means. Who wants the end wants the means, it being understood that every end requires the appropriate means. It is obvious that in order to build a vast totalitarian prison one must employ means other than those needed to build a workers’ democracy. No one thinks of writing with a revolver or firing with a pen. But is it possible to consider founding a republic of free workers by establishing the Cheka, I mean an extraordinary commission judging in secret based on case files, outside of any control other than that of the government, accused it doesn’t see, who have no right to defense and can be executed in the shadows? Like work tools, shouldn’t institutions be adapted to the ends pursued?
One doesn’t make, one won’t make a socialist revolution by picking reaction’s old methods out of the mud, where they lay during periods of social decomposition. During civil wars, in power, during discussions, in organizing, revolutionaries and socialists must rigorously forbid themselves certain behavior that in some regards is effective and at times even easy, under pain of ceasing to be socialists and revolutionaries. All of the old methods of social struggle aren’t good, since they all don’t lead to our goal. We are only the strongest if we attain a higher degree of consciousness than our adversaries, if we are the firmest, the most clear-sighted, the most energetic and the most humane. In reality these four terms are inseparable: they form a whole.
Ever since Stalin succeeded in establishing without a violent counter-revolution a totalitarian regime infinitely stifling and cruel, the working-class world has been asking itself the how and why of the affair: the need to review the history of the Russian Revolution from a critical point of view imposes itself. Such a study is one of the primary conditions for any progress in socialist consciousness. What is striking is not that that after ten years the counter-revolution carried the day within the proletarian revolution, and that after twenty years it would arrive at the monstrous results we are witnessing. It’s that in order to triumph, from 1923 – the date of the first defeat inflicted on the Trotskyist Opposition – until 1928 – the date of that Opposition’s definitive defeat – and then until 1936 – the date of the beginning of the massacres of the Old Bolsheviks – Stalin and the bureaucratic leadership were able to put to use the gears of power that were forged before their arrival I power, to make use of the not [illegible] functioning, but by gradually falsifying it through legal ideas, the mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to finally cast the latter aside and establish a bloody dictatorship over the proletariat. Given all this, how can we not ask if the Bolshevik regime didn’t have several weaknesses, several foundational or functional vices that facilitated the bureaucratic usurpation? The question cannot not be posed.Trotsky doesn’t want to pose it. He proceeds from the idea of an ideal Bolshevik, with no flaws or faults and whose history until 1923, that is, until the moment when Trotsky himself, along with Preobrazhensky and forty-six old militants, realized that the regime that in reality was suffering from an extremely serious illness, remained irreproachable and unassailable. This is certainly not a scientific (Marxist) or indeed any kind of point of view that can be maintained today. And yet Trotsky so passionately rejects any attempt at a critical examination of the most important historical facts that he is even able to write that “The Pharisees of all orders only return so obstinately to the subject of Kronstadt and Makhno” because reaction is emerging victorious throughout the world! Insult cannot replace argument, especially when it is accompanied by such a distortion of the facts, for Trotsky cannot be ignorant of the fact that the drama of Kronstadt has disturbed the consciousness of a large section of the working class movement since 1921! Nor can he be ignorant of the fact that many voices rose up within the Bolshevik Party in the middle of the revolution to denounce abuses, to ask anxious questions, and to advocate new solutions. Do I have to remind him of the discussions that arose in the party in 1918 about the functioning and even the very principle of the Cheka? Do I have to remind him of Riazanov’s brave interventions against the death penalty at the Pan-Russian Executive? The criticism of the bureaucratization of the party and the state by the Worker’s Opposition in 1919? The discussions about War Communism and the NEP? The Central Committee generally didn’t have to stifle these voices, for they were those of revolutionaries too concerned for the safety of the revolution to not step aside and remain quiet when the circumstances demanded it. In times of revolution the militant must always sacrifice the secondary to the essential, criticism to unity.
One of the most repulsive discoveries I made through reading the book was how much the Bolsheviks exploited popular anti-Semitism. Figes discusses this towards the end of the book:
According to Gorky, the Bolsheviks deliberately used the Jews in their ranks to carry out confiscations of church property. He accused them of deliberately stirring up anti-Semitism to divert the anger of the Christian community away from themselves. In several towns, such as Smolensk and Viatka, there were indeed pogroms against the Jews following the confiscation of church property. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were closing down synagogues as part of their campaign against religion. The first to be closed were in Chagall’s home town of Vietbsk in April 1921. The Soviet authorities claimed that six of the city’s eighty synagogues were needed for conversion to Yiddish schools. The Jews quickly occupied those synagogues which had been targeted for closure and held prayer meetings in them. But the authorities removed them with troops, smashing windows, chanting ‘Death to the Yids!’ and killing several worshippers in the proess. None of the synagogues was used as a school: one became a Communist university; several were turned into workers’ clubs; one even became a shoe factory. More closures followed in Minsk, Gomel, Odessa and Kharkov. Overall, 800 synagogues were closed down by the Communists between 1921 and 1925.
There was more than just a tinge of anti-Semitism in all this. The lowest party ranks were filled, in Gorky’s words, with ‘old Russian nationalists, scoundrels, and vagabonds, who despise and fear the Jews.’ The Military and Workers’ Oppositions, which mobilized their support from the lower party ranks, both used the rhetoric of anti-Semitism in their language of class animosity towards the ‘bourgeois specialists’. The early years of the NEP, which witnessed a boom in the sort of small-scale trading where Jews were traditionally dominant, strengthened this anti-Semitism. For the lower-class Bolsheviks, in particular, it was galling to see the ‘Jewish’ traders ‘taking over’ Moscow. During the civil war these ‘speculators’ would have been arrested; now they lived better than the party rank and file, while half the Russian workers were unemployed. The revolution, it seemed to them, was in retreat both on the class and the racial fronts. It was in this context that many of the more militant Bolsheviks began to argue, as Marx himself had done, that the Jews as a social group were synonymous with capitalism – that all traders were essentially ‘Jews’. Such ideas were prevalent in the Bolshevik campaign against Judaism which took off in 1921. The ultimate insult of this campaign was delivered on the Jewish New Year of 1921 when a mock ‘trial’ of Judaism was put on for propaganda purposes. It was staged in the same courtroom in Kiev where the innocent Beiliss (also read: Judaism) had been tried in 1913.-pp.749-750
The graphic description Figes gives of Bolshevik attempts to destroy individualism made me even more disgusted with the whole experiment than I ever was. Even when I considered myself a Marxist, I still clung to the illusion that it could be reconciled with individualism. My socialist individualism proved to be incompatible with Leninism. Figes discusses how Lenin’s admiration of Taylorism factored into the social-engineering experiments of the Bolshevik regime. These were measures taken not simply due to ‘difficult objective conditions’ and a desperation to improve production, but were seen as attempts to create a new socialist man:
Alexei Gastev (1882-1941), the Bolshevik engineer and poet, took these Taylorist principles to their extreme. As the head of the Central Institute of Labour, established in 1920, he carried out experiments to train the workers so that they would end up acting like machines. Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly by holding a hammer attached to and moved by a hammering machine so that after half an hour they had internalized its mechanical rhythm. The same process was repeated for chiselling, filing and other basic skills. Gastev’s aim by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’ (a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian verb to work, rabotat‘). Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought this would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gatev envisaged a brave new world where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as ‘A, B, C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on.’ These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought’, and would simply obey their controllers. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat’. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer’. This nightmare utopia was satirized by Zamyatin in his novel We (1924), which inspired Orwell’s 1984. Zamyatin depicted a future world of robot-like beings, the ‘we’, who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are programmed in every detail. The satire was dangerous enough for We to remain banned in the Soviet Union for over sixty years.
Gastev’s vision of the mechanized society was no idle fantasy. He believed it was just around the corner. The ABC of Communism, written by Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in 1919, claimed that a ‘new world’ with ‘new people and customs’, in which everything was ‘precisely calculated’, would soon come into existence. The mechanistic motifs of Proletkult art were supposed to foster this new Machine World. There was even a League of Time, whose 25,000 members in 800 local branches by the time Zamyatin wrote We, kept a ‘chronocard’ on which they recorded how they spent each minute of their day (‘7.00 a.m. got out of bed; 7.01 a.m. went to the lavatory’) so as to be more efficient in their use of time. The crusaders of this clockwork world wore oversized wristwatches (there is still a fashion for them in Russia today). As self-appointed ‘Time Police’, they went round factories and offices trying to stamp out ‘Oblomovism’, that very Russian habit of the wastage of time. Another one of their plans to save time consisted of replacing the long words and official titles of the Russian language with shorter ones or acronyms. Politicians were told to cut their verbose comments, and speakers at congresses to keep their speeches.-pp.744-745
These dystopian horrors were part and parcel of what is known as ‘Bolshevism’. It is indistinguishable from Stalinism.
Figes’ book is an exploration of how human nature itself, not Russian backwardness, destroyed the Bolsheviks’ schemes. No amount of bureaucratic repression and propaganda could discourage people from turning to illegal trade, and, the ambitions of Proletkult notwithstanding, most Russians retained conservative aesthetic tastes – Lenin included. Kollontai’s far-reaching reforms of marriage and the family also foundered against the conservatism of ordinary Russians. The repression carried out against the Church failed to weaken the hold of religion over the masses, but, if anything, strengthened it. But rather than accept the painful truth, it is far easier for Marxists to blame Russian backwardness for Marxism’s failure.
The experiment went horribly wrong, not so much because of the malice of its leaders, most of whom had started out with the highest ideals, but because their ideals were themselves impossible. Some people might say that it failed because Russia in 1917 had not been advanced enough for socialism, at least not on its own without the support of the more advanced industrial societies. Thus, in their view, it was Russia’s backwardness and international isolation that led it down the path of Stalinism rather then the logic of the system itself. This is no doubt in part true. None of the Bolsheviks of 1917 had expected Soviet Russia to be on its own – and even less to survive if it was. Their seizure of power in October had been predicated upon the assumption that it would provide the spark for a socialist revolution throughout Europe, and perhaps throughout the colonial world. When this revolution failed to come about, they almost inevitably felt themselves bound to adopt a strategy that, if only in the interests of defence, put industrialization before all else. And yet since the Soviet model has so often led to the same disastrous ends – despite having been applied in different local forms and in such diverse places as China, south-east Asia, eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Cuba – one can only conclude that its fundamental problem is more to do with principles than contingencies.
The state, however big, cannot make people equal or better human beings. All it can do is to treat its citizens equally, and strive to ensure that their activities are directed towards the general good. After a century dominated by the twin totalitarianisms of Communism and Fascism, one can only hope that this lesson has been learned.-pp.823-824
A fitting conclusion to a mammoth book, one which I highly recommend to everyone. What a shame that the people in the IMT would rather read Woods’ idiotic book on Bolshevism, and take that as the final word on the subject. Even though Woods rubbishes Figes every chance he can get, his own book in fact cites Figes and leans heavily on his research. Clearly, Woods found it suited him to use the research of ‘bourgeois historians’ when it confirmed his own prejudices, whilst slandering or ignoring them if they dared to question the sacred doctrine of Leninism. No scholar himself, he happily rides on the coat-tails of others. I hope people will shun this cultish attitude, and find Figes’ book as informative as I did.